It’s funny, I despised pointers in school. Pointers, in computer science, are like little Post Its with directions scribbled on them. They say “the information you’re looking for is stored here.”
I learned Java first. Java, being a newer programming language, takes care of its own pointers. But then I took a class on C++, which is slightly older. Suddenly I needed to know what pointers were, but also how to manage them. Forget to delete them, and your code got messy and inefficient, or even outright broke. It was exasperating.
So it’s funny how much of my brain now somewhat resembles a mass of pointers. Before the Internet broadened all our horizons so much, people knew how to do a few things. You learned from your dad or your aunt or whoever, how to change a tire. If you needed specialized knowledge, you asked someone at church or in one of your friend groups. Maybe you asked someone who knew someone and got an answer.
The process was slow. Inefficient. Much like humanity, I suppose. It did allow you to make new social connections in the process, or fail to do so, I guess.
It’s a very different world now. I’ve been an adult for years now. My dad did show me how to change a tire on a car… but in all honesty, I don’t remember how.
This isn’t a problem. I don’t need to remember how. All I need these days is my phone and YouTube. I did a quick search while writing this article, and stopped counting at 20 how-to guides. There are basic ones, starting with one that’s 12 years old (ancient by Internet standards). There’s ones by women for women. There’s ones by people who spell tire “tyre.” There’s even slightly related ones like how to change a dirt bike tire, motorcycle tire, or just generally about car tires.
The Internet is now in my pocket at all times. In my adult life, I think I’ve needed to change a tire maybe 5 times. It’s simply not worth it to try to keep that memory accessible. Instead, I outsource the knowledge to hundreds of enthusiastic YouTubers, who will, for the price of a few minutes of my attention, provide me with exactly the information I need.
I still memorize things, such as info I use for my job. How to run each machine, what things need to be set up and how. And to be fair, specialized knowledge like that often can’t be found online. My dad’s ultraspecialized chemistry knowledge, for example, is likely only found in textbooks or the heads of people like him.
That’s likely becoming less and less true as time goes on. The example in was going to use was “how to run the machine I use at my job,” but when I looked online, I found an hour and a half video of a maintenance guy explaining and demonstrating how the machine works, plus several other machines in less detail.
Granted, none of that information would tell you how to do my job, but it’s still far more than I expected to find. It probably helps that the USPS is a bigger company than McDonald’s, Wal-Mart, and Starbucks combined. So that’s a lot of plants and a whole lot of employees. But still, that information is supposed to be proprietary. We’re not supposed to have phones out in the plant and somebody did this whole lengthy video. The mind boggles.
I guess in the end it’s less important that I know how to do things, and more that I know how to problem solve or find the answers I need. I hope. But a brain full of pointers seems more efficient than the old way of doing things, at least for now.
realisticautistic 